Ladle Rat Rotten Hut Read online

  This is a special FREE edition on the 25th of June.

  It contains the first four Grimm Prequels:

  1 Snow White Blood Red

  2 Ashes to Ashes & Cinder to Cinder

  3 Beauty Never Dies

  4 Ladle Rat Rotten Hut

  “This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, except only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.”

  Neil Gaiman

  Prologue

  Two hundred years ago, the Brothers Grimm altered the true fairy tales, hiding that fact its characters were immortals, secretly living among us.

  They placed a curse upon the immortals, burying them in their own dreams, so they won’t ever wake up again. The immortals’ bodies would appear as if in a coma in the real world while their minds created a world of their own imagination in a realm called the Dreamworld. The Brothers Grimm once mentioned this curse in the Snow White story when she was sleeping in her glass coffin. In the original scripts, they called it the Sleeping Death.

  However, the immortals broke the curse by intertwining their dreams, and were able to wake up for a brief time every one hundred years. The good ones wished to tell the truth about fairy tales. The bad ones planned to bring wrath upon our world.

  Since immortals did not die, descendants of the Brothers Grimm summoned the Dreamhunters, a breed of angels that kills immortals in their dreams. The confrontations didn’t end very well.

  Everything that happened in that period was documented in a Book of Sand, or what mortals call the Grimm Diaries. Different fairy tale characters wrote each diary, telling part of the story.

  My name is Sandman Grimm, and my job is to seal the final edition of the Grimm Diaries every one hundred years, using a magic wand that writes on pages made of sand. After I seal the diaries, they will dissolve into sand that I throw into children’s eyes every night to create their dreams.

  What follows are mini diaries I call the Grimm Prequels, scattered and buried pages that didn't make it to the main volumes of the Grimm Diaries. There are seven of them, each told by a famous character. You might want to read them before the first full-length diary called Snow White Sorrow. It will give you an idea of how this world is like.

  The prequels don’t necessary hold the truth. Some characters might want to manipulate the truth in their favor. And since the prequels don’t give away much of the story, some matters could seem confusing at times.

  It’s better to think of the prequels like snap shots of a magical land you're about to visit soon. I like to think of them as poisoned apples. Once you taste them, you will never see fairy tales in the same light again.

  Snow White Blood Red

  A Grimm Diaries Prequel

  A teaser story for the upcoming release of

  The Grimm Diaries Series

  by Cameron Jace

  Copyright © 2012 Akmal Eldin Farouk Ali Shebl

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  All facts concerning fairy tales publication dates, scripts, and historical events mentioned in this book are true. The interpretations and fantasy elements aren’t. They are the author’s imagination.

  Snow White Blood Red

  as told by the Snow White Queen,

  wrongfully known as the Evil Queen.

  Dear Wilhelm Carl Grimm,

  She is not that giddy, naïve, and helpless princess she pretends to be. Please don’t let her fool you with her innocence if you see her sing to the birds in the forest. Resist her charm from bringing joyful tears to your eyes, and shield yourself from her devious beauty before she deceives you into wanting to kiss her awake. It'll be a kiss of death. Your death. That’s how she fooled the Huntsman, Prince Charming, and me, her birth mother.

  I still remember the original script of the fairy tale, the one you wrote in 1812. It clearly stated that she was my own flesh and blood daughter. I don’t have the slightest idea why you altered it fifty years later.

  What was the point of turning me into an evil, narcissistic, and heartless stepmother, blinded by jealousy and envy of the young princess?

  For years, I have been looking for you to tell you the truth about her, but you were impossible to reach.

  But I found your brother, Jacob. He told me that you wanted to tone the story down so children could sleep better at night, instead of having nightmares about the Queen who sought to eat her daughter’s heart and liver.

  Shame on you, Wilhelm.

  You, of all authors, knew why I sought to kill her. My actions were justified. I was trying to save my kingdom from her wrath, before everything we loved was destined to an end. The same way you had to rewrite the true fairytales after cursing us, so the War of Sorrows would not continue ever after.

  Night after night, and year after year, parents fed their children false bedtime stories, until your lies grew into inescapable memories. Your happy ever after lies, Wilhelm, shaped the world.

  I wondered why you didn’t burn the original scripts, instead of rewriting them. You must have figured out that sooner or later someone would dig up the truth and expose you. Altering it was the smarter solution. You let children believe that the bites were resurrecting kisses, and that torturing glass coffins were made for sleeping beauties, waiting for a prince to come and kiss them awake.

  A wise man once said that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he was someone else. You did the same with us, Wilhelm. You turned us into pastiches of the immortals that we really are, and made it harder for us if wanted to persuade the world otherwise.

  I know that you did it to save us from her. And I appreciate how you concealed our real names, or we would have ended up like Rumpelstiltskin, tortured by those who knew of his real name.

  But sometimes, I can’t help but wonder why no one ever questioned why I was called the Evil Queen, and why I was never given a real name in the books.

  Was I so superficial to the world, so stereotypical and mundane? Why was I treated as if I were the monster of the week?

  You know what I think? I think that the world never got the time to hate me. It just wanted to hate me long before it met me.

  If I tell those who detest me about the true nature of their little princess, would they ever care about me half as much as they care about her?

  I know that deep inside, they adore me. They like the way I talk, walk, dress, and even the way I kill.

  They are just afraid to admit how much they love me. I am the Snow White Queen, strong enough that I don’t need anyone’s pity or love, because I am loved by the greatest and most majestic heart in the world:

  Mine.

  It’s 2012 now, Wilhelm, and it’s time we all wake up from the curse, and correct the wrongs. I know that most of us don’t remember who we really are, but we will find each other. This time, I will win this war for good.

  I will bring down the superficial world that praises fairy tales as happy ever afters without knowing what they are talking about. Bur I have to do it before she wakes up again from her Sleeping Death. God only knows what would become of us then.

  Do you have any idea how many times I tried to kill her? Do you have any idea?

  I tried witchcraft, charms, demons, bloodsuckers, plagues, poison, Black Death, and practiced every sinf
ul dark art ever known to immortals. I sank to my knees, begging the oceans to drown her, pleading the volcanoes to burn her, but it was all in vain.

  I went as far as to bury her in the Dreamworld, six dreams under, where no immortal has ever survived.

  But she did, and only the devils know how.

  She is empowered by the love of the children who adore her. Every time children dream about her, she feeds on their dreams. Such powers are greater than life and death.

  Still, you refuse to tell me about the Lost Seven. Remember them, Wilhelm? The ones you rewrote into dwarves?

  Like Silverfish, they are hiding somewhere in the dusty pages of every fairy tale that has ever been written, eating the parts that belong to me. I need to know who they are, Wilhelm, or it will be the end of all of us.

  Although honesty is not my fairest charm, I admit that I am no angel. It would be foolish to pretend that I am. I have danced with mischievous faeries too close to the dark side of Neverland. I have ushered young butterflies to the deceiving light of fire. I have slaughtered, tortured, burned, suffocated, poisoned, ripped out hearts, and sat on my throne watching young beautiful girls lying dead on the floor of my castle as I bit on blood-apples topped with chocolate syrup and fresh milk.

  But you know what? I am not even half the beautiful evil that she is made of.

  Since you kept the Lost Seven’s identities from me, you left me no choice but to show you what my majesty can do:

  I found your brother Jacob today, hiding in the cottage in the forest where she used to live. It’s as if he was addicted to the scent of her death on the bed sheets. When he refused to tell me about the Lost Seven, I poisoned him and ended his life, the way a Grim Reaper does.

  If you to keep their identities from me, I will kill each and everyone of the Grimms. I will be your Grimm Reaper.

  As I sat on his bed, watching him die, I told him a bedtime story. A deadtime story, to be precise. I told him about her.

  That’s is why I am writing you this letter, to tell you what I already told your brother.

  So dear Wilhelm, let me bleed on these pages with my quill pen, made of feathers as black as crows, writing on paper as white as doves, and ink that is as red as your brother’s blood …

  It was the last decade of the eighteenth century when I realized what she really was, fifteen years prior to killing her.

  I was looking outside my royal chamber’s window in my castle. The winter had already come, and the snow covered the land with aprons of shining ice. It was one of those twilit winters, known by the locals for bad omens and superstitions. I didn’t believe in such things, but when the snow buried the purple poppy fields underneath a shroud of a thick layer of white, I had my doubts.

  The peasants believed the curves of the land resembled the body of a gigantic girl, buried underneath. They claimed she was a demon princess who fed on the light of day and left us in the dark, that she drank the rain falling from the skies before it reached the starving earth.

  I couldn’t stand their ignorance when rumoring that the princess buried in the snow was an incarnation of my daughter. I detested those low-life peasants, spreading their superstition in the Kingdom of Sorrow. As the Queen, I was left to rule alone while the king was away, leading his timeless war against real demons, lurking at kingdom’s borders. It wasn’t the right time to correct and educate the ignorant peasants. Part of me was rather satisfied when I watched them starve to death, unable to seed the earth. They deserved it.

  But it wasn’t just them who starved. Our animals disappeared on a countdown to extinction. All, except the crows. Those damn crows, pecking at each other out of hunger. I watched them spiral down from the bruise-colored sky, blood spattering all over the snow like red rain, staining my kingdom with black, white, and red shades. The three wicked colors I hated the most.

  Watching the snow from my bed that day, I accidentally pricked my thumb while Snow White lay nestled in my arms. I don’t know how I hurt myself, other than being distracted by her beauty and innocent face. Those lovely doe eyes of hers were gleaming above her chubby cheeks, curving like ocean waves whenever she smiled at me.

  Sometimes, I listened to her, humming melodies filled with words that did not make sense. It was a song, orchestrated in her fragile mind. But it had rhythm. Its effect was so enchanting to her that I found myself wiggling my toe. It was beautiful. In my mind’s eye, I could imagine a singer’s voice seducing wooden instruments to bend and dance with mirth and ecstasy, as if wood was once dead, now alive.

  I don’t know how she possessed such beautiful doe eyes. Neither the king nor I had them. Only one other man in my husband’s family did. It was my husband’s vicious father, whom we did not speak of his name. He had hunted us for years after we’d escaped him, crossing oceans and continents, cursing us for creating our own kingdom in far away realms which he had no access to. His doe eyes were far from beautiful, for they were blackened with sorrow.

  Snow White wrapped her small, almost boneless hands, finger by finger, around my pricked thumb. She did it so gently that her touch took my breath away. I almost cried tears of joy. As hard as she tried to press on my thumb, her skin felt like silk on my flesh, and I wished that she’d never let go of me. It was true that I was her mother, and she needed to hold on to me, but little did she know that I needed her more than she needed me.

  I laughed as her face knotted in evil childish curves, staring at that stubborn thumb of mine, unable to pull it closer. In her frustration, she reminded me of cats chasing balls of thread on the castle’s floor.

  Since I would have granted her any wish in exchange for one of her fabulous smiles, I didn’t mind lending her my thumb, which seemed to be of importance to her more than the milk in my breasts.

  I wondered why.

  I noticed a drop of blood on top of my thumb where I had pricked it. When I tried pulling it away, her hands seemed stronger suddenly, but not strong enough to pull my thumb against my will. It was the unusual increase in her strength and determination in her eyes. I thought I saw her veins surfacing momentarily on her almost-boneless neck.

  However, it wasn’t alarming enough. Mothers are blinded by their love for their daughters. I was enchanted by her, thinking that if I died nurturing her, I would barely have noticed my own death. Only after my responsibility toward her was fulfilled, would I allow death to take hold of me.

  I wasn’t gifted with immortality yet. I am the Evil Queen, remember? Always the last one to be considered.

  I gave in and loosened my thumb for Snow White to pull it closer to her…

  At first, she pulled my thumb to her chest, staring at it. Her eyes had a sudden golden tinge to them. Then it disappeared like a falling star you get to see only once.

  “Are you alright, Shew?” I wondered, as I preferred to call her by that name. I didn’t expect an answer since she hadn’t learned to talk. But something told me that she understood my words, and I was expecting her to nod or a blink.

  But she didn’t.

  She pulled my thumb up with both of her tiny hands and sucked on it, which I found mesmerizing and cute, like when she was sucking on her own thumb while asleep. Her sucking was ticklish. After all, her teeth hadn’t grown yet.

  My husband had warned me many times that she should not suck on her thumb. He considered it a bad habit that was inappropriate for princesses.

  As she continued with my thumb in her mouth, the golden tinge loomed back into her eyes. This time, it stayed.

  Suddenly, I remembered the drop of blood and tried to pull it away. Again, it wasn’t that she was stronger than me. In fact, her weakness was her greatest power. It was that I found it strange that she insisted to on lodging a pricked thumb with blood in her mouth.

  Before I considered believing in the bad omen the peasants talked about, a most beautiful smile landed on her face, the way fluttering stars shine in the midnight skies.

  Curving cheeks, dancing eyebrows, and a single wiggling n
ose accompanied Snow White’s symphonic smile.

  Finally, she let go of my thumb. I patted her, hugged her, and told her a bedtime story. It was about a beautiful girl who had been cursed by a witch to stay asleep forever until a most charming prince came and kissed her awake, and how they lived happily ever after. Snow White loved to fall asleep to this story. I wondered if she ever dreamed about a prince when a sudden lightning struck outside, illuminating trees into crystal Candelabra.

  If I were to believe in the peasants’ superstitions, I would have claimed that Snow White’s sleep brought light to the snowy night, and that the giant demon girl covered with snow was an incarnation of my little Snow White.

  As she went to sleep, I wiped a drop of blood off her red lips, not knowing what the coming days had in store for my kingdom and me.

  The incident never happened again because I didn't prick my thumb in front of her after. I did prick my thumb a lot in my years, but not for her – and that was another story for another occasion. I was alert enough to keep her away from the sight of blood.

  Sometimes, she still stared dreamingly at my thumb, like a girl standing next to her mother in the kitchen, tiptoeing to see if she finished baking her favorite apple pie, so she could start eating it. The eagerness was inescapable.

  Seven years later, my concerns were confirmed, and I knew that there was no way back…

  It was a festive day. My husband and I welcomed the king and queen of a neighboring kingdom called Red. Part of it was celebration, and another part was joining forces in confronting the demons trying to breach our borders and threaten our safety.

  We were used to fighting demons in our time, but those were darker ones like nothing we had ever seen before. They were spreading a curse, causing the infected to lust for human blood. We were told the infection had wiped out Europe, and it came to finish us as well.